In recent years, the diameter of semiconductor wafers and the size of liquid crystal boards have been progressively increased with increasingly higher integration of semiconductor devices, resulting in a higher unit price per semiconductor wafer and liquid crystal board. For this reason, it is necessary to stabilize manufacturing processes to increase the product yield rate. Particularly, stable operations have been regarded as a critical challenge for devices which directly affect the manufacturing processes, such as a dry vacuum pump.
With a batch processing apparatus which processes a large number of wafers in batch in a single process such as LP-CVD (Low-Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition) used in semiconductor device manufacturing, if a dry vacuum pump suddenly stops during the processing, a large number of semiconductor wafers are damaged to possibly cause major losses. On the other hand, in regard to liquid crystals, an increase in size has been progressed to such an extent that the board area exceeds 4 m2, so that damaged boards would result in a tremendous loss. See Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2005-9337.
In situations as mentioned above, a demand has been increased for a system which makes self-diagnosis of dry vacuum pumps and provides a safeguard against the failures beforehand to prevent damages in products. At present, a central monitoring system manages the operation of multiple dry vacuum pumps for satisfying the demand. This current central monitoring system, though capable of monitoring multiple dry vacuum pumps for operating situations with a few computers (personal computers), does not have a function of making self-diagnosis of the dry vacuum pumps.